Company Adopts PUE Metric as Standard for Measuring Datacenter Efficiency

SAN FRANCISCO, May 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: DLR), a leading owner and manager of corporate and Internet gateway datacenters, announced today that it has published the industry's first energy efficiency data about its datacenter facilities. Digital Realty Trust will use the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric as the methodology for measuring and reporting energy efficiency in its portfolio of facilities in North America and Europe. Digital Realty Trust is the first company to provide customers with detailed and actionable information about how datacenter operations are meeting their corporate green IT objectives. The Company will also publish benchmarks that will support industry-wide initiatives to make datacenters greener and reduce expenditures on energy.

PUE is an emerging standard promoted by The Green Grid and others in the datacenter industry to provide a simple and consistent method of measuring the ratio of power delivered to IT equipment to the total amount of power used by the datacenter facility. PUE provides reliable information about the energy efficiency of datacenter facilities by calculating how much power is devoted to driving the actual computing/IT components (servers, for example) versus the ancillary support elements such as cooling and lighting.

Digital Realty Trust is committed to developing practical standards that reduce datacenter power requirements and negative by-products while increasing their operational effectiveness. Our datacenter facilities are designed to LEEDs (U.S.A.) and BREEAM (Europe) certification standards. Digital Realty Trust is a voting member of the Green Grid consortium.

The interesting effect is how customers can now compare their own data centers vs other hosting companies as Jim Smith, VP of engineering states. Imagine a customer asking for the PUE for a hosting facility and the sales rep, says "PUE? What is that?"

"Digital Realty Trust has been a leading voice on this issue since well before it gained the prominence it has today, and has achieved a number of important industry milestones related to green datacenters. However, I believe that reporting the PUE metric for our datacenter facilities is the most significant milestone yet because it will provide a model and benchmarks that can be used industry-wide to achieve dramatic increases in energy efficiency and can be used by customers to compare the energy efficiency of different datacenter facilities."

It will be interesting to see what kind of numbers Digital Realty Trust publishes and whether they publish the range of PUE vs different times of the day and year as well as how load can effect PUE in their facility.

Remember PUE is a dynamic number, not static, and is expected to fluctuate in a range.